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Dr. Ticho's paper contains the basic elements of a book. Its many interesting and important topics deserve further definition, expansion, and illustration. One of these is the concept of personality itself, and the terms Dr. Ticho uses more or less interchangeably: “personality traits,” “personality attitudes,” and “personality factors.” Another is the challenge of bringing these matters into psychoanalytic training, including supervision. This alone is a chapter!
Dr. Ticho reopens the problems of patients' identifications with the analyst and of their various transferences, both as to sequence and completeness. He has limited his clinical applications almost entirely to borderline and “hysteroid” patients and has necessarily stopped short of considering numerous other entities encountered in children, adolescents, and adults. Surely there is more to be
said, also, about certain “types” of analysts and how they function differently with different “types” of patients.
It is patently unfair, of course, to demand a book when an author sets out to write a paper. My point is that what Dr. Ticho is writing about justifies a book. A related topic concerns the personality factors involved in patients' choice of an analyst. Hill's (1951) article on why a certain group of patients chose him for their analyst offers data for further exploration.
It seems to me that Dr. Ticho could effectively limit his discussion to the analyst's “personality traits” or “personality attitudes.” As one who was trained to think of the “total personality” as a psycho-social-physiological entity in dynamic interaction with a total environment—the general point of view of Menninger (1963) in The Vital Balance—it is difficult for me to delineate personality as Dr. Ticho does. In my view, age, sex, color, politics, religion, residual neurotic traits, countertransference proclivities, and countless other attributes constitute the personality of the analyst which, in its adaptive and other functioning,